1948 Plymouth Business Coupe – Pretty It Ain’t

Glen Dodd’s 160-mph ’48 Plymouth Won’t Win Any Car Shows, but It’ll Clean House on Many Cars That Can.

OK, consider this a poke in the eye to the readers who took issue with our cover feature on the Derelict ’52 Chrysler/DeSoto wagon in the Apr. ’11 issue. While we’ll take some deserved heat for calling it a beater when it should have been labeled a rat cruiser, the fact remains that Icon 4×4’s driver was one of the coolest, most functional cars we’ve driven in a long time, even if it didn’t have pretty paint and the latest 20-inch wheels. Get over it.

Are rat rods just un-pretty hot rods with minimal attention to fit and finish as a trade-off to get the things on the road and enjoy them, or are they a conglomeration of junk held together with bubblegum welds, wood screws, and coat hanger spiderwebs put together strictly to draw attention to themselves? Since the popularity of the trend has made the label all-encompassing, like Kleenex and Band-Aid, it’s probably a bit of both at this point. Because of the generic use of the term, the Derelict and this car, Glen Dodd’s ’48 Plymouth business coupe, will no doubt be called rat rods, even though they really aren’t. They’re just not pretty by the standard definition.

Glen is a longtime competitor in the One Lap of America race, running the event for more than 20 years with co-drivers Mike Stein (17 years) and Charles Lovelady (10 years). In that time, Glen has developed a reputation for not only being a fierce competitor, but for also building clean, detailed race cars in his Carolina Rod Shop, located in Piedmont, South Carolina. This car is not a show-stopper, but it was built to race, not win beauty contests. “We placed Third in our class (Early American) both years we ran this car,” Dodd says. “We would have won, but it rained a lot both years, and those wide tires just kept coming around on the wet tracks. When it was dry, we would win. When it was wet, we lost.”

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Glen’s wife bought the Plymouth as a Christmas present for him 3 years ago because they had one when they got married back in 1956 (if you’re in the middle of doing the math, Glen is 73 years old), and she wanted Glen to restore it for old time’s sake. “The floors were gone, the inner fenders and rockers were rotted away, and the body was rusty,” Glen says. “I told her I could find one for $8,000 and it’d be done, but I’d have twice that in restoring it.”

The last owner also threw in the towel on a restoration, but not before sanding the body to bare metal and pushing it outside, letting it sit for five years while it grew a thick coat of hairy surface rust. “I just sanded the rust down with a 7-inch grinder and got rid of the high spots,” Glen says with a laugh. “BASF told me they were developing a paint to go right over rust. We just blew it off and wiped it down with lacquer thinner before shooting the clear.” So yeah, the rust brown paint is really brown rust. “It’s held up really well. It only came off where I peeled off the stickers.”

Glen built floors, rockers, and a complete trunk before fabricating a rollcage, finishing the interior with carpet, insulation, a simple sound system, race harnesses for the track and three-point shoulder harnesses for the road, and a sideways-mounted jump seat in the back for the third man.

Early in his racing endeavors Glen realized there was no need to reinvent the wheel, so other than an ’06 Dodge Magnum, his six One Lap cars have employed Corvette suspensions and small-block Chevy engines. He started with the original ’48 frame and adapted a complete ZR1 front suspension, while the Vette’s aluminum, Dana 44–based, 3.73-geared IRS was grafted on after kicking the rear framerails inboard a couple of inches. The Corvette also gave up its sway bars, coilovers, 14-inch/two-piston front and 13.5-inch/single-piston rear disc brakes, master cylinder, and power booster. Its 17×9.5 and 17×11.5 wheels tucked under the fenders without narrowing anything, Glen tells us, “but I stretched the wheelbase back a couple inches, so I redid the rear wheel opening,” moving it back and recutting the radius to make tire changes possible. BFGoodrich 285-40ZR17s are currently at the corners, but for hot laps he runs 275/40ZR17s and 315/35ZR17s—there’s plenty of room inboard. Power is from a ’99 Camaro LS1 topped with a Magna Charger, backed by the Camaro’s six-speed.

It’s ugly, but nimble, fast, and reliable, going more than 50,000 miles without incident. The same can’t be said for Glen, however, who was forced to miss the ’10 One Lap because he was being put back together after falling through a skylight on the roof of his shop. The fall was good for a full set of broken ribs, four holes in each lung, a broken sternum, broken pelvis, bruised heart, and dislocated shoulder—and he hit something on the way down that poked a hole in the back of his noggin. He shouldn’t have even made it to the hospital, but once there they gave him two days. One year to the day later, he was hitting 100 mph showing us what the Plymouth can do.

“It took me 90 days to get my license back,” he tells us. Most people leave the hospital after something like that with a prescription for really good pain meds, but Glen left with a prescription for a driver’s test. “If you think the DMV is bad, you haven’t seen anything,” he says. Apparently, a driving test from the hospital for a septuagenarian patched together with bailing wire and JB Weld is a grueling, all-day affair, though he passed it handily. We can only imagine what they’d think if he showed up in the Plymouth to take the test. Chances are they’d have ordered a psych exam.

Check Out The Video
Go to CarolinaRodShop.com to see in-car video of Glen running the Plymouth through the autocross at a Goodguys event.